Watching her as she put up the card table and dealt the first hand, Jim was torn between pride and irritation. She coped with grief so well now, and her calm was admirable and catching. The kids were actually settling to sleep as though they were sure of safety, the cat was purring, Mrs Geary was unconcernedly drinking tea out of her saucer, even Joan was easing into a better state, and all these things were a direct result of that patient, stubborn courage of hers. But he knew with equal certainty that the self-same doggedness, the self-same sense of responsibility had already moved her away from him and their marriage and all the things they’d been planning together on the way home. And that was painful.
He stayed with them for as long as he could, but the raid was still going on when he had to leave. Peggy walked out into the hall to say goodbye. They stood in the jumble of luggage like a couple of refugees.
‘Goodbye, Tabby eyes,’ he said, kissing her. ‘Write to me.’
‘Every day,’ she promised, kissing him back.
‘You’ll be all right?’
‘I’ll be all right.’
It made him ache to kiss goodbye. Her lips were soft and warm and her skin still smelt of the sea. ‘Oh God!’ he said. ‘This is awful. I can’t leave you.’
‘Go now,’ she urged, pushing him gently towards the door. ‘You don’t want to miss your train.’
But that was just what he did want. Why did the war have to come crashing in to pull them apart just when they were so happy together? This God-awful sodding war.
He travelled back to Hornchurch in a turmoil of conflicting emotions, love, anger, remembered happiness, pride that he’d rescued her from her misery dampened by annoyance that she was back in London and facing danger again, barely satisfied desire growling beneath a most rewardingly gratified compassion.
It was a difficult journey with wreckage on the line halting his train, the Underground running slowly, and the raid going on noisily above it all. It took him so long that he only just got back to camp in time and by then he was so tired and frustrated that sleep was impossible.
He lay in his uncomfortable bed at one end of the hut, listening to the snores and grunts and farts of his companions, and was miserably lonely. Tomorrow, he promised himself, as he turned from side to side for the twentieth time, tomorrow I shall find a flat. He had to, because he couldn’t bear for them to live apart. Not now. Not after being together night and day for nearly a fortnight.
He didn’t, of course, although he stormed into Horn-church the minute he was off duty and scanned the notice boards at every newsagent he could find. There was nothing in the Exchange and Mart either, but he comforted himself that at least he’d made a start.
‘Nothing yet,’ he reported to Peggy when he wrote to her that evening. ‘Still, it’s early days. I shall keep on trying. I miss you so much. All the time day and night. Especially night.’
The next day he took the Underground to Upminster and tried there. And was disappointed again.
‘No, sir,’ one newsagent told him. ‘You won’t find nothing here, and what there is you officers have took. We got a housing shortage.’
And another was quite scathing. ‘Little flat?’ he said. ‘Do me a favour! There’s a war on!’
But Jim continued his search, growing more and more dogged as his hope diminished. There must be something somewhere. One little room, that’s all he wanted. But the longer he searched the more he knew in his bones that it was impossible. He’d known it all along. The camp was full of airmen mooching about in the evenings because they were parted from their wives and they all earned the same money as he did and they’d all rent rooms if there were rooms to rent. It was demoralizing.
He kept his true opinions hidden from Peggy, of course, because there was no point in them both being miserable. ‘Nothing yet but you never know, something might turn up tomorrow.’
But after three weeks of it he was morose with loneliness and disappointment.
It was just as well that Froggy Ferguson was on the camp, for Froggy was his usual cheerful self and full of high spirits.
‘Seen this?’ he said at breakfast one morning.
‘What?’Jim asked.
Froggy pushed a rather battered magazine across the table towards him. It was a copy of the Picture Post, with a cover showing six plump toddlers sitting one behind the other on a slide, and a headline offering ‘A Plan for Britain’.
‘No,’ Jim said, glancing at it. He’d been too busy to read anything, except the Exchange and Mart, and now he was too brassed off. But he made an effort to be interested. ‘Good, is it?’ The Picture Post usually was.
‘A1,’ Froggy said. ‘Just up your street. You ought to read it.’
Jim took the paper, without very much interest, but he didn’t look at it again until late that evening after a long day in the hangars, and by then he was so tired he thought he would just flick through it before he went to sleep. But it turned out be such an absorbing issue that he was still reading it at lights out, and he read on eagerly the next morning, picking up where he’d been obliged to leave off, returning to it at odd moments during the day, digesting it piecemeal, one article at a time, eating the printed word like a man long starved of words and ideas. For what words they were. And what ideas. It even took his mind off his miseries.
The entire magazine had been given over to a consideration of the sort of world that could and should be built when the war was over. It was heady stuff. There was an article on work, that argued that there should be jobs for everyone and that the banks should be controlled by the state; there was one called ‘Social Security’ that urged a minimum wage for all working men and allowances for children and special forms of help from public assistance for people who were off work through no fault of their own because they were sick or unemployed; there were articles on town planning, home design, the use of the land, even leisure, written by none other than JB Priestley; and best of the lot, a marvellous piece called ‘Health for All’ that was written by Julian Huxley, who made it meticulously clear that if we wanted a healthy nation the first thing we had to do was to ensure that everybody in it was properly fed, and that when that was done the next thing was to establish a National Health Service into which every worker would pay week by week while they were fit and earning, like a sort of insurance, and which would then allow anyone to be given the medical treatment they needed free at the time they needed it.
By supper-time Jim felt as if he had been introduced to another world. A world full of people who thought as he did. It was just what he needed, a vision of utopia, an unequivocal call for a better, fairer society, and beneath it all the understanding that this was what they were all fighting for.
That night he wrote a long letter to Peggy telling her all about it. It made a pleasant change from reporting failure. ‘Get a copy,’ he instructed, ‘and see if you don’t agree with it. It’s exactly what I’ve been thinking all my life. Pass it on to old John Cooper when you’ve finished with it, with my regards. He’ll love it. Oh Peggy, it will be such a brave new world when all this is over, a world we can be proud to live in, and we are the ones who will build it. Think of that.’
It took Peggy a great deal longer to read the magazine than it had taken Jim but that was because she had so little spare time. She’d gone back to the wardens’ post on the night after Joan was bombed out, and been welcomed with such obvious relief and pleasure that she felt quite proud of herself. They were such a good team and they worked so well together, no matter how difficult things were. And things were very difficult in those wintry days.
Ever since she’d been bombed out Joan had suffered from terrible nightmares. Baby stuffed ear-plugs in her ears and slept through everything, air raids, weeping, people crashing about in the dark, even the sirens, but Peggy and the kids were woken every time. And if the nights were usually disturbed the days were always overburdened, with running the house, endless queues for shopping and never ending worries about meals and rationin
g.
Joan tried to help her when she could but little sleep and long hours at the factory left her so exhausted by the end of the day that she was slow and clumsy. And Baby resolutely refused to set her hand to any housework at all. And Jim still hadn’t found them anywhere to live.
‘I shall be glad when this war is over and we can start to build this brave new world,’ she wrote to Jim. ‘It sounds wonderful.’ But it all seemed a long way away, especially in her present state of exhaustion. ‘Perhaps things will be better in the spring. We might have found a flat by then.’
But he knew, as she did not, that the spring and calmer seas would bring a renewed danger of invasion and that Fighter Command was preparing itself for the next onslaught. In that miserable winter of 1941 their brave new world was a consolation but a very distant one. And although he wangled several thirty-six hour passes and cut across London to see her, feeding at her house and sleeping together, oh so happily, in his room at number two, he still couldn’t find them a home of their own.
CHAPTER 33
‘There’s nothing to look forward to,’ Sid Owen complained. ‘This fucking war’ll go on for ever.’
‘Can’t see no end to it,’ Tommy agreed. ‘Fucking war.’
‘Look as if you’re doing something,’ their sergeant advised. ‘Fritz the mitts is on this morning.’
The platoon was planting potatoes in a bleak German field on a cold March morning and their particular guard was renowned for his short temper.
Sid bent to his task again. His face was pinched with cold and captivity and his hands were caked with mud, the nails chipped and cracked and black-rimmed. He looked down at them ruefully, very different hands to the ones he’d used so cleanly and with such pride in the bakery. And now the bakery was gone too, blitzed and gone. It was all horribly depressing.
‘We’ve been here ten months,’ Tommy said. ‘Ten fucking months. What are they playing at back home? Why don’t they invade France and send the buggers packing?’
Sid looked across the damp fields to the foreign rooftops miles away between the hills. ‘If we knew where we was, we could make a run for it,’ he said.
‘And get shot down?’ the sergeant reminded him. ‘Not bloody likely. ‘Sides, how far d’you think you’d get in that rig? Have a bit a’ common.’
‘We could strangle Jerry an’ nick his uniform,’ Sid suggested.
The prisoners all round them began to join in the game.
‘Garrotte a guard.’
‘Fix old Fritz.’
‘We could live off the land.’
‘Travel by night, hole up during the day.’
‘Get to the Channel. Nick a boat.’
They’d had the same conversation innumerable times since they arrived in the camp and they all knew it was an impossible fantasy. Yet they returned to it again and again, because it fed them with the hope they needed to keep going and because it reminded them that one day they would be free men again.
‘And what d’you think you’d live on, you great daft Arabs?’ the sergeant asked.
‘Our wits, Sarge?’ Tommy offered, wiping his forehead with his sleeve.
‘Since when you ever had any wits?’ the sergeant mocked. ‘Gaw dearie me. You try living on your wits ol’ son, that’ud be the quickest way to the firing squad. No, no. All we got ter do is stick it out. Hang on. Tide’ll turn in the end you’ll see.’
But it didn’t seem to be turning at the moment. It all seemed to be running Hitler’s way, as the Camp Commandant was gloatingly happy to tell them, at length, in broken English, and at every available opportunity.
They heard that London had been bombed flat, that Coventry, Plymouth, Glasgow, Bristol, Birmingham, Southampton had been reduced to rubble, that the German armies were invincible wherever they went, that because the ‘poor fool English’ had decided to escort their merchant vessels to England in convoy they were being picked off and torpedoed one by one. ‘Sitting ducks you understand’ and that ‘as a consequence’ the populace was starving. ‘You vill soon be beaten to submission,’ he said. ‘You vill see.’
‘Submission my arse,’ Sid would growl when each diatribe was over. But it was demoralizing just the same. Particularly as they had no other source of information.
‘Wonder what my ol’ girl’s doing,’ he said to Tommy as they stooped to the potatoes again. ‘I’ve almost forgotten what she looks like, it’s been so long.’
‘I dunno,’ Tommy said. ‘Not planting spuds, that’s for certain.’
Sid would have been surprised and annoyed if he’d known. She was taking delivery of a Morrison shelter, which was the newest idea in air raid protection and had been designed for people who had no room for an Anderson shelter in their garden. This one was an indoor shelter, a huge reinforced box like a cross between a double bed and a cage, and she’d ordered it to protect the kids. She and Peggy had arranged a day off work to receive it, which was just as well because it was an enormous thing, almost too big to squeeze into the house, even in its dismantled state.
It took the combined sweat and effort of four people, Joan, Peggy and both delivery men, to manoeuvre it into the kitchen and bolt it together, and when the job was finished it filled the room.
‘Bli’ me!’ Mrs Geary said when she saw it. ‘Where’s the kitchen gone?’
‘We’ll put a cloth over it and use it as a table,’ Peggy said. Their old gate-leg table was pushed against the window, diminished to a shelf.
Baby was appalled. ‘For heaven’s sake!’ she said. ‘We ain’t got room to swing a cat.’
‘Can’t say I’ve ever wanted to,’ Peggy teased her, stroking Tom’s tabby head.
But the kids were thrilled.
‘It’s like a little house,’ Yvonne said, crawling into it at once. ‘Ever so cosy.’
‘Better than the cupboard?’ Joan grinned at them.
‘Heaps!’ Norman said, settling onto the mattress. ‘Ain’t it big! I bet we could all sleep in here. Like sardines.’
And he was right. There was room for all of them to lie down side by side and sleep in security if not exactly in comfort, so when the raids were bad and the bombers were overhead, the entire household, cat and all, squeezed into their protective cage until the danger was past.
Jim was at Catterick and he wasn’t pleased to hear what they’d been doing either.
When he knew he was being posted there he’d been rather pleased about it, because although it would mean that he couldn’t get home to Peggy on a thirty-six hour pass, a new place might give him the chance of a flat somewhere. He’d spent every spare moment on his first four days scanning the local papers and tramping the streets. But his search was as futile in Catterick as it had been in Hornchuch and for the same reasons.
‘A little flat, two rooms, bed-sit, anything would do,’ he’d asked, over and over again.
But the answer was always the same. ‘Sorry. No. Don’t know of any. Your officers take what little there is, you see.’
One newsagent promised to let him know if anything came up, but by now he had very little hope. When her letter arrived describing the shelter he received it as another disappointment. It made him aware that she was steadily adapting to their life apart and that he was beginning to accept that it was very unlikely that they would ever be able to live together properly. But he tried to see the sense of what she was doing and wrote back as approvingly as he could.
‘Just as well you’ve got it with the spring coming, just in case AH has another bash at invasion. At least we’re better prepared this time. The new Spitfire Mark V is fitted with two cannon and a superb engine. Once we get that it’ll be a match for anything. Chin up! The blitz can’t go on for ever. I’ll get a place for us sooner or later, you’ll see.’
But the bombers were still getting through and although they didn’t arrive every night, especially when the weather was bad, there was a dusty weariness about London that winter, an exhausted dogged resignation. They’d been under at
tack for six months now and as far as they could see the blitz could go on for ever. Food was short and getting shorter. In March the meat ration was reduced to l/10d a week and the butter ration was down to a mere 4 ounces.
But at least the Furnivall/Geary household felt safer in its new shelter. And when spring came there was no invasion, although in April the Luftwaffe made two such ferocious attacks on London that they were soon being referred to as ‘the Wednesday’ and ‘the Saturday’. All the front windows in Paradise Row were blown out and part of Mrs Roderick’s roof caved in. But there was no invasion. And then it was May and fine weather and rumours began to spread that the invasion barges had been removed from the Channel ports. Strong sunshine striped their dusty roofs with colour, broken glass suddenly gleamed rainbows, the bomb sites were bright with weeds and there were no raids for a week, for ten days, for a fortnight.
‘Where’s Jerry?’ Londoners asked each other. ‘Where’s ’e got to?’
‘Perhaps he’s given up,’ Mr Allnutt hoped.
‘And about bloody time too,’ John Cooper said.
But then, just as they were all beginning to relax, Megan came to call with some rather upsetting news.
‘My Dad’s going back in the army,’ she told Peggy. ‘Company sergeant-major to train the new recruits. He’s got married quarters so Mum’s going with him, she says.’
‘What’ll you do?’ Peggy asked, feeling the pang of parting even before she heard her friend’s answer.
‘Dunno,’ Megan said. ‘I could get a room somewhere, I dare say. I wouldn’t like to leave London. Not now.’
‘Cross yer bridges when you come to ’em,’ Mrs Geary advised. ‘When’s he going?’
‘End a’ July,’ Megan said. ‘Not long.’
‘Oh well,’ Mrs Geary said. ‘Lots could happen before the end of July.’
And lots did, although finding a room for an airman to rent anywhere near an RAF station was still totally and miserably impossible. On 2 June clothes were rationed, on 10 June Norman was sent home from school with chicken-pox, and two days later Yvonne joined him in their sticky cage with her own uncomfortable crop of spots. As there were no more raids and the weather was extremely hot, Peggy and Joan set up two beds for them in Mrs Geary’s old room upstairs, where it was marginally cooler, and where they would have a great deal more space in which to suffer.
London Pride Page 45
